Former US President Donald Trump speaks at a post-classified documents arraignment event at Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, New Jersey, on June 13, 2023.
Amr Alfiqi | Reuters
Special Counsel Jack Smith filed a federal lawsuit on Monday. Court of Appeal To overturn a lower court’s decision to dismiss a criminal case accusing former President Donald Trump of mishandling classified documents.
In a surprising decision, U.S. District Judge Eileen Cannon dismissed the lawsuit in mid-July, finding that Smith’s appointment violated the U.S. Constitution.
In court arguments Monday, Smith argued that Cannon’s ruling deviated from binding precedent, “misinterpreted” the law authorizing the appointment of special counsels and “failed to take sufficient account” of the history of those appointments.
In a filing with the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals, Smith wrote that Cannon’s decision “is at odds with an unbroken line of decisions, including those of the Supreme Court, which have held that the Attorney General of the United States has the authority to appoint a special counsel.”
“This court should reverse the verdict,” Smith wrote.
He also asked that the case be sent back to a federal district court in South Florida, but did not ask the appeals court to remove Cannon, a Trump appointee, from the case.
Lawyers for Trump, who is the Republican presidential nominee facing Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris, did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment on Smith’s brief.
Even if the appeals court grants Smith’s request to overturn Judge Cannon’s ruling, there is virtually no chance that Trump will be tried on these charges until after the November 5 presidential election.
Before she dropped the case, legal commentators and others had increasingly accused Cannon of unnecessary delays in pretrial proceedings.
A federal grand jury had charged Trump with illegally storing hundreds of highly classified records at his Mar-a-Lago estate after he left the White House in January 2021, and then trying to obstruct government efforts to recover them.
Smith’s brief Monday afternoon noted that the Supreme Court, in its landmark 1974 decision in United States v. Nixon, decided that the attorney general has the authority to appoint a special prosecutor.
That ruling has been upheld by every other court that has considered the issue, except for Cannon, the special counsel wrote.
Smith’s motion also argued that the logic of Cannon’s ruling “unnecessarily calls into question” long-standing Justice Department practice and suddenly calls into question the legitimacy of hundreds of appointments across the executive branch.
“The absurdity of this ruling highlights the lack of merit for the district court’s novel conclusion,” Smith wrote.
